Madden NFL 09 (PS3)
It's a big, glorious game, but does it score a touchdown?
8/12/2008 6:08 PM | 2 Comments | Page 2 of 3
What's Hot: Utterly beautiful graphics; BackTrack lets you see rewind the play to learn from mistakes; 80+ enhancements
What's Not: Online league play needs fine tuning; Not enough Madden commentary; BackTrack can be misused
The PS3 shows slightly less detail than the Xbox 360 in sunlight. It's better in bad weather, though.
One of the things I don't like is that each year, there's less and less of Madden in the game. Some have said this is a good thing, indicating that Madden is too old, even that he's going senile. In my mind, the game isn't complete without the folksy, knowledgeable persona that John Madden has so carefully crafted and honed over the years. (Right, I know. He uses the "F" word in off-camera conversation a lot. But in the game, he's Big Daddy Football and that's how I want it to stay.) The cheeky Cris Collingsworth is smart and talkative enough, but he's not the big man. Madden has to be used more in the future for color announcing as the game progresses, not just for brief tips on plays and as the ADE Ghost.
Veteran players won't like the fact that there's this time-travel thing called BackTrack. On the surface, it's pretty intense. You go back prior to the play to discover, via Collingsworth, what went wrong with your coaching, passing, catching and the like. What I don't like is that you can then re-do the play. It's supposed to level the playing field between veteran players and the novices, but those five-minute quarters could go on for hours if a novice wants to remake every play. I have nothing at all against newbies. But let eager young noobs play against other noobs, or against those vets who have more than an hour a day to play at Madden. The solution? Thankfully, the ability to redo plays can be limited.
If Quentin Jammer takes you down, you can try again with BackTrack.
I always struggle to understand other reviewers who say online play is seamless when they review a game. Look, with any online game, you're going to have glitches and frame rate drops, especially if you play for, say, an hour or longer. The glitches in Madden NFL 09 for the PS3 are minimal. But they will happen (although I was never kicked off a game due to technical errors). Also online, the trash-talking on the parts of players who I don't know is annoying at best. These folks are, more often than not, the worst players, anyway. Just play the game online and shut your pie-hole. Your banter isn't going to be as semi-witty as the guys in the new Madden commercial, anyway.
The one potentially great, new online feature allows us all to form leagues and take those leagues all the way to the Super Bowl. Probably the best way for this to work is to have 31 friends and acquaintances become part of the fray. If you have just a few friends to round out the league, the draft function will likely give you and your friends the NFL's top players. I suppose you can think of that as the best versus the best. But if you're a sim junkie, it's just not as close to reality as Madden is supposed to be. EA needs to work on these online leagues for Madden NFL 10.
